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What do you usually do with old hardware?
| 5528 votes / 21% |
| 2779 votes / 10% |
| 11037 votes / 43% |
| 3652 votes / 14% |
| 840 votes / 3% |
| 1767 votes / 6% |
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- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
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Repurpose (Score:5, Interesting)
Hardware trickles down from my gaming PC to many other computers.
Depends on the era of "you" (Score:5, Interesting)
The young geek me used to hoard. It was scary. At one point I had more than a dozen large CRT monitors at the house.
Then I realized it was just a bunch of junk. I identified two or three complete computers and adequate networking gear to support them that I wanted to keep and anytime someone came over I let them take anything that wasn't turned on. After a couple months of that I loaded up what I thought was still useful and donated it. What was left I trashed.
Since then I only acquire what I need, and use it until it no longer functions, at which point I trash it.
The hoarding stage is all about learning about electronics. Once you think you've got a good understanding of the gambit of electronics that can be had for cheap or free there's little reason to keep any of it around.
Re:One man's old... (Score:3, Interesting)
What really burns my ass though, is they put that 2 year old PC in the dump's electronics bin, and the dump workers won't let me take it home with me! Granted, it's being recycled, but it would be a big upgrade for me.
Re:One man's old... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have five categories of equipment:
"Vintage" -- stuff that is unique enough to keep around, such as a fingerprint scanner from UareU, CDs of Windows 98 and XP, an Adaptec 2942UW card, various HDDs and floppy drives, and an occasional parallel port based tape drive or ZIP drive. Stuff that is interesting enough to keep, such as a Syquest 44 or 88MB drive which was decently fast at the time.
"Junk" -- stuff that is not going to be interesting to anyone, takes up space, and won't be useful for much. Broken IDE HDDs for example.
"Pointless" -- stuff I keep around because it does work, but the low-end Pentium and its OS is far better running in a virtual machine than discrete hardware just due to electricity usage.
"Backlevel" -- older equipment which might be useful such as a CRT monitor, functioning IDE hard disks, and so on.
"Servicable" -- any USB or SATA hard disk, USB flash drives, removable hard disks, and other stuff made in the past couple years. No, that old AGP card might not be fast, but it might still allow a computer to have video that is several years old and has data so it can be P2V-ed.
Re:Outdated. (Score:5, Interesting)
For some reason I always feel guilty when I trash stuff that still works. I would really love to give it away to somebody who needs it, but looking for this person is too much of a trouble, so I just hoard it.
As an electronics hobbyist I try to reuse some parts, but mostly that boils down to just hoarding smaller parts.
I think if there were a service that would allow me to get rid of the old hardware *before* it gets terribly outdated and stops being useful to anybody except me, I would really upgrade more often, knowing that no resources gets wasted.
Give it to Free Geek! (Score:3, Interesting)
Unlisted option - Buy it! (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of my hardware is someone else's old hardware... usually corporate hand-me-downs... err, ex-lease. Auctions rock!
My employer keeps buying me the new toys, but my personal data centre is 2nd-hand everything. Thin clients are a fave - a bit of extra RAM and a USB stick becomes a firewall, VoIP PABX, or silent lounge PC. Even the rack is approaching 20 years old, from a corporate donor.
Old hard drives aren't worth keeping. Gigs-per-Watt heads North each year or so, so the oldest ones get a drill through them, then off to the recyclers.
Re:Outdated. (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't much care if someone resells it once they come and take it away. It's theirs, they can roll it up and smoke it for all I care. Just so long as I'm not tripping over it tomorrow.
Re:Craigslist (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah.
This Mac I'm typing on was probably $5,000-$6,000 when it was new, six years ago. I got it "for free" - I was doing an unpaid internship (not one of my better ideas, in retrospect), and they felt so guilty about not paying me that they basically paid me in stuff (also got a Droid phone and a few other little goodies).
I checked eBay to see about how much it's worth, as I was considering some upgrades. I expected maybe $1,000 - Moore's Law would claim it would be only $400 (6000 / 2^(72 / 18) = 375), but I don't think that applies to full computer systems. I know you can easily build a similarly-powerful computer for maybe $800.
Nope. Someone was selling the same model, and bidding had gotten up to $3,000. Another, slightly-lower-end one had a Buy It Now price of $4,000.
Mac fans are morons.